As the Internet has grown in scope and size over the past twenty years, there has been a corresponding exponential growth in the number of web sites and web users. As these web sites have proliferated in number, size and complexity, web site performance has become an important issue. Today's web sites are considerably larger and more complex than those that emerged 20 years ago, which has exacerbated the performance issue. Due to the need for improved performance, technology improvements have emerged to address this problem. For the most part, web performance has been able to keep pace with user demand. However, these technologies have focused on the wired desktop environment, which historically reflected the environment of most conventional users. Recently, however, the amount of web traffic to mobile users has grown to surpass that of desktop users.
Current approaches to speeding up the delivery of web content to end users have been primarily focused on conventional wired networks and attempt to improve the speed of delivery by simply relocating as much of the web content as possible closer to the end user through the use of Content Delivery Networks, or CDNs. With incremental improvements in network technology such as cloud storage and computing, content caching, and Domain Name Services (DNS), the speed of delivery has steadily improved. These approaches have succeeded in accelerating web content delivery from the web origin by caching a significant portion of web content at the Internet edge. By delivering web content to the user from the edge, rather than from the web origin site, the propagation delay has been significantly shortened. As propagation delay may be the major contributor to latency, typically this means bypassing 30 to 80 milliseconds of delay. For end user devices with wired connectivity, the approach is able to reduce web content delays by 80% or more. However, for mobile end user devices such as smart phones or tablet devices connected to the Internet via a wireless cellular network connection, the previously described wired propagation delay may represent only a fraction of the total content delay, because delay through the cellular network is able to be several times the delay seen in the wired portion of the connection.
Previous approaches have not addressed the problem of content delivery speed over mobile cellular networks. Because cellular networks are significantly different in structure and design from wired networks, they present new complexities and obstacles that have not been addressed by these conventional approaches. Latencies that are generated inside the cellular network cannot be addressed by simply moving content closer to the edge, especially when the cellular network latency is able to be several multiples of the propagation delay that exists from the web site origin to the edge.